Enterprise-class Servers
Buying quality hardware with a good warranty goes a long way towards insuring we can provide platforms for various applications here at Drew. If the server hardware isn't reliable and people can't depend on the application or service being available, then there isn't much point to buying the server or offering the application to begin with.
There are some basic rules of thumb we use to insure we purchase reliable servers:
- We only purchase servers from Tier 1 vendors with a 3-year warranty
- We only purchase servers that include RAID adapters to handle disk arrays. This insures that a single disk failure in a server cannot disrupt service or lose configuration data or user (or University) information.
- We only purchase servers with enhanced remote management facilities, to help us diagnose and sometimes fix problems, even when we can't be on-campus.